Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Ratcliffe has travelled to Moscow on an unannounced visit, the first by a serving agency chief since the months before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on August 26 that no meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin was planned, in remarks to the Russian agency Interfax.
Peskov said the trip was linked to contacts between the two countries’ security services and declined to elaborate, according to The Washington Post.
A United States Air Force Boeing C-17 transport aircraft landed at Vnukovo airport outside Moscow on the morning of August 25 and departed about four hours later, flight-tracking data showed. The aircraft had flown from Joint Base Andrews near Washington with a stop in Riga, the Latvian capital.
CBS News and Axios first reported that Ratcliffe was on board, citing unnamed sources. The CIA declined to comment and neither the White House nor the US embassy in Moscow has commented publicly.
Washington asked Ukraine to hold off strikes on Moscow, St Petersburg and northern Russian regions between August 24 and 26 while the delegation was in the country, a source familiar with the request told Reuters.
The visit comes as European governments track a run of incidents on NATO territory. A suspected Russian Kh-101 cruise missile came down in a field near Tarnawa-Kolonia in Lublin province, eastern Poland, on July 30, leaving a crater about 10 metres wide.
German investigators have since recovered explosive-laden drones near Leipzig/Halle airport in eastern Germany, one of which US officials linked to a Russian intelligence service.
US assessments reported on August 6 by The Wall Street Journal found Putin could attempt a limited attack on a NATO member state within the next few years, in scenarios ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale ground incursion.
Those findings track warnings from German and Baltic services, though Putin has accused NATO of preparing for war against Russia and called the alleged threat a pretext for higher Western military spending.
Ratcliffe has kept a channel open to his Russian counterparts since taking office in January 2025 and negotiated the release of the US-Russian dual national Ksenia Karelina in April that year.
The last CIA director to visit Moscow was William Burns in November 2021, three months before Putin ordered the full-scale invasion.
Diplomacy on the Ukraine War has stalled since trilateral rounds in Abu Dhabi and Geneva earlier this year. The last senior American officials to travel to Russia were the envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who met Putin in January.
